[...] A leading campaigner for East Timor independence, Jose Ramos-Horta, said Indonesia was seeking to repeat the "ugly, tragic
years" of 1975-79 when some 200,000 East Timorese died in the aftermath of Indonesia's invasion, "without one single
international witness."

"I have information that many males have been disposed of, have been killed and dumped into the sea," he said. [...]

[...] Within walking distance of the besieged U.N. compound in Dili, Catholic sisters sheltering 300 refugees, mainly women and
children, said militias had threatened to attack at nightfall. [...]

"The police and military are clearly collaborating with the militias, they are not doing anything, nobody can defend the people. We have been threatened yesterday and the day before. Some of our refugees have fled to the hills."

"All the stores are burned and there is lot of looting. The shooting is getting closer. The militias are shooting at the men in the hills and behind them the military are also shooting."

[...] Villagers have told of men being marched to the waterfront in Dili and gunned down out of view of observers trapped inside safe houses. [...]

John Aglionby,
"'To Survive I Knew I Had to Get Out'"
The Guardian (UK), 10 September 1999

[...] Just as he [a prominent pro-independence activist], his wife and his children were about to leave, a young man ran into the house telling a terrible story. He had come from the port, where he and some pro-independence friends had been trying to leave on a ship. The women boarded, but the men were dragged away. Five were stabbed to death in front of him and their bodies dumped in the sea. [...]

Lindsay Murdoch
"Stacks of Bodies Went Up to the Roof"
The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1999

NOTE:Serious doubts have been raised about the veracity of the following report -- see coverage for 15-25 September

[...] The destruction of the capital is greater than anybody could imagine. Hundreds of houses are blackened shells. The doors of government offices are ajar. Banks, cafes, hotels, boarding houses, service stations: all burnt or trashed.

One building - the police station - hides one of the most shocking of many shocking stories that have emerged so far from East Timor's killing fields.

Two days ago Ina Bradridge, wife of Mr Isa Bradridge, 45, of Ballina, walked the corridors of the station looking for a toilet.

According to Mr Bradridge, who told her story last night after evacuation to Darwin, she happened to glance inside a large building that she knew was once used as a torture cell for political prisoners.

"My wife told me she saw bodies. Thousands of them. Stacks of bodies went up to the roof. I know it is hard to believe but it is absolutely true. My wife saw arms and legs and dripping blood."

Now, from the safety of Australia, Mr Bradridge plans to do a lot of talking on behalf of his wife, who can't speak English, in the next few days.

"They [the Indonesian military] are going to obliterate everybody," he said before boarding one of the evacuation trucks with his family. The East Timorese have a choice ... they either leave or die."

Leaving Dili to fly out in the same RAAF shuttles that take out the Bainbridges, we drive in silence through the mass destruction, past street after street of smouldering ruin.

There are looters and thugs carrying pistols who walk with the arrogant swagger of the victor.

But Dili is basically empty. In five days 70,000 people have gone. The bare-footed teenagers with fresh fish tied to their poles are gone. The clapped-out taxis, the naked kids playing on the debris-strewn beachfront, the old people hawking Portuguese-era coins who used to bother us at the hotel, the people who used to sit in the gutter every morning and read the local newspaper. All gone. [...]

We drive past the two-storey Australian consulate, which was abandoned in great haste two days ago after the militia had spent two days terrorising the diplomats.

The high-iron gate is open and Indonesian soldiers are walking inside. We see the militia in greater numbers along the road from the consulate, towards the airport. One pushes an empty trolley, his head down, almost running. But it's hard to imagine there's anything
left to loot.

It is here that for the first time we see ordinary people. Hundreds of women and children are camped out in the grounds of Dili's main police station. [...]

Dili Burns

Original Caption: "Dili, East Timor's capital, burns after pro-Indonesia militias looted and destroyed parts of the city. The bloody campaign by pro-Jakarta militias that has killed hundreds of East Timorese will not be allowed to derail the shift toward independence, the head of the UN mission in the territory said Thursday." (Reuters - POOL)

[...] One distraught young mother said she witnessed the murder of two refugees on the back of a truck inside West Timor. She said she saw the two men tied up in a truck by militiamen on a road inside West Timor.

"Suddenly, in front of lots of people, a militia member drew a sword and slowly stabbed one of the people in the truck. Lots of blood began gushing, flooding the floor of the truck until it began to drip out," she said.

"The other man's hands and feet were tied like a pig and he was thrown like a bag of rice onto the asphalt then thrown into another truck."

Another man said he watched terrified at the West Timor port of Akapupu, near Atumbua at the northern end of the border, as militia used machetes to kill men alleged to be independence supporters. They were among East Timorese disembarking from a ship which had come from Dili.

"Other men had their hands tied and they were put on trucks and taken away," said one source, who is collecting accounts for presentation to the international community. [...]

[...] Comparisons to Kosovo and Cambodia have increasingly been made as television footage shows men, women and children, their hands raised, being herded at gunpoint from burning homes. [...]

Lindsay Murdoch
"Time to Pray, and Run the Militia Gauntlet"
The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1999

Pat Burgess wipes away the tears. He doesn't want to make the life-or-death decision.

The Australian political officer working for the United Nations has just been told that staff and their dependants, including Timorese, are evacuating from the besieged UN compound in Dili.

But everybody inside knows that if we leave behind 1,500 refugees who have crammed with us into the compound the young men among them would be accused of being pro-independence and probably killed.

Burgess, like many other UN staff, hates the decision to evacuate that was made on the other side of the world in New York. But he has no choice. "Tell the young men to run," he tells his interpreter, wiping away more tears.

Burgess knows very well the lies that Indonesia's military and police officers have told the UN for months.

Promises that the Indonesian armed forces and police would not harm the refugees mean nothing. Asked what he thinks will happen to the women and children, he says: "They will probably rape the women."

Families sit around candles and pray for a long time. Some weep. They talk in whispers. These are intimate moments we do not want to disturb.

Only the gunshots and distant explosions break the near silence. But as the night wears on we step over babies and children sleeping on concrete and distribute our remaining food. It is only a few cans of corned beef and some packets of noodles but we are on our way to Darwin, away from the gunshots, the explosions, the orchestrated terror.

Or so we think.

The men run in the early hours as smoke continues to rise into the air from dozens of fires across the largely deserted town.

So too do many of the young women, particularly the pretty ones. For 24 years Indonesian soldiers in East Timor have violated the women, for their selfish pleasure, with impunity.

As they run, fresh gunfire erupts. Short, sharp volleys.

Soon some of the men return exhausted after trying to climb the hill that rises almost vertically from the back of the compound. They report that the Indonesian troops who are supposed to be protecting us from attack fired over their heads, forcing them to return.

But soon others try other routes and find ways past the troops. With the fittest leading the way, others follow, including mothers carrying babies, cooking utensils and their few possessions.

As they shuffle into the darkness many of us are deeply concerned, justifying our helplessness by thinking that the East Timorese have shown remarkable resilience during decades of immense suffering.

[...] One of the last journalists in the compound, The Sydney Morning Herald's Lindsay Murdoch, said the refugees feared they would be killed or raped after the U.N. evacuation.

"People here don't have any doubt that if they are left completely, certainly the young men would be killed and the women raped," Murdoch told Australian radio as he awaited evacuation. [...]

"East Timorese Forced into Camps"
BBC Online, 10 September 1999

[...] Conditions in the camps [in West Timor] are reported to be very poor.

"They are like Nazi camps," said Adalberto Alves, a Timor resistance spokesman from the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor.

"They [the refugees] cannot leave the concentration camps. They are receiving food, one meal a day only,as food is being saved for the women and children," he added. [...] [? Not clear who is doing the "saving"]

John Aglionby
"Herded, Sifted and Cut Off"
The Guardian (UK), September 10, 1999

[...] For most of the tens of thousands of refugees now in West Timor, dignity is in short supply. Whether they have arrived from East Timor by land, sea or air, the welcome is the same. They are whisked off by police and soldiers to camps guarded by pro-Indonesian militiamen and dumped there for processing.

The first stage is political identification, according to Manuel, an East Timorese who was able to get into the Noelbaki camp eight miles outside Kupang. He said when people arrived their names were checked off against a list of 20,000 known pro-Jakarta supporters. If they were on it, or could demonstrate support for Indonesia, they were put to one side.

All the others were taken to another part of the camp. Here the conditions are much worse, with people squashed together with little food and water.

"Many of the men are then 'taken away for questioning'," said Manuel. "The women have no idea what happens to their husbands. Many have not returned."

One woman said a militia camp guard told her: "You may have got your country but it will be a land full of widows." The woman had arrived in Noelbaki with her husband and two children on Monday. She has not seen her husband since. [...]

"Fiddling As Timor Burns"
The Guardian (UK), 11 September 1999

[...] The Catholic church, a key target for Muslim militiamen, vainly denounces a new genocide as its priests, nuns and congregations are slaughtered, its cathedrals set ablaze. At least 200,000 people - almost a quarter of the population - have fled. An untold number of pro-independence supporters, especially men, have simply disappeared. Even the 80-year-old father of the Timorese leader, Xanana Gusmao, was not spared; he was murdered this week, his wife is missing. [...]

Robert Garran, Richard McGregor, and Don Greenlees
"Tears for the Slaughtered"
The Australian, 11 September 1999

[...] The rampage [at the U.N. compound] came just after the UN had pulled out 350 international and local staff on evacuation flights to Darwin, leaving 80 foreign staff in the besieged Dili compound.

Last night, there were reports of heavy gunfire behind the compound as refugees who had taken cover there attempted to escape to the hills.

After arriving in Darwin yesterday, British police sergeant Philip Caine expressed the general concern about the East Timorese left behind, saying: "I was thinking to myself as we were coming out that all I was facing was a hairy ride to the airport – and they were probably facing death."

The Australian-based National Council for Timorese Resistance said two truckloads of East Timorese women and children were taken from refugee camps in West Timor in recent days and slaughtered by militiamen. [...]

Louise Williams and Leonie Lamont,
"Rape Used Over and Over as a Systematic Torture"
The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1999

Sister Maria leaned forward and quietly confided the truth about the Catholic orphanage which lies along the lonely northern coastal road of East Timor: "Most of the children are mixed race, the babies of women raped by Indonesian soldiers." This is not a truth openly voiced in East Timorese society. Instead, said Sister Maria in an interview in Dili eralier this year, the children were raised by the Church. But, while they are not openly rejected, everyone knows the shame of their parentage.

In the early years following the Indonesian invasion, orphanages were filled with genuine orphans: so many adults had been killed in military operations. Now, Sister Maria said, most are children of rape, a tactic used over and over again in war, usually to hurt the father or husband of the victim. The woman's own suffering is an afterthought in a war between men. "One young woman I knew had four babies, I kept asking her why this had happened again and she just said there was nothing she could do," she said. Sister Maria's own whereabouts remain unknown, following the rampage through Dili and the murder of Catholic nuns and priests.

Rape, according to a report released this year by Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, has been systematically used by elements of the Indonesian military in East Timor, Aceh and Irian Jaya. "Rape was used by the military as a form of revenge, or to force the relatives out of hiding," she said. "Much of the violence against women in East Timor was perpetrated in the context of these areas being treated as military zones ... rape by soldiers in these areas is tried in military tribunals, and not before an ordinary court of law." Under Indonesian law, for a rape to be prosecuted it required corroboration – including the testimony of two witnesses. Women lived in a "realm of private terror," for any victims or witnesses who dared to take action were intimidated with death threats, Ms. Coomaraswamy reported.

"Many of the women who were raped as virgins are single mothers who have suffered stigma in their communities after giving birth to children of Indonesian soldiers ... Some of these children are the result of rapes, others are the product of a situation that resembles sexual slavery and some are the result of consensual sex ... the women are having a very difficult time, not only because of poverty, but because the sight of these children often reminds them of rape." She said the Indonesian state should take responsibility for these children.

Senator Marise Payne, one of the parliamentary members of the Australian observer delegation to East Timor, said she had been told of soldiers picking attractive girls from the villages, and making them their "playthings." "This has been happening for 20 years," she said. A Catholic nun, Sister Tess Ward, said: "Many women have said to me they feel dirty, and are too ashamed to tell people. I don't know of anytime when women were game enough to tell the police. Many of the people said to me the only people we can talk to is the priest or sisters."

"There are reports of women and children being forced into trucks to be taken to West Timor while men and boys are left behind. We know and we fear -- from Kosovo -- what that may mean."

Deputy British representative to the United Nations Stewart Eldon, statement to the Security Council, 11 September 1999

SYDNEY, Sept 13 (AFP) - East Timor lobby groups Monday said
international peacekeepers had only hours to stop a massacre by the
Indonesian army and pro-Jakarta militias.

"There's no time to waste," Abel Gutteres, president of the East
Timor Relief Association, told AFP, a day after Indonesian President
B.J. Habibie bowed to international pressure for peacekeepers to be
deployed.

"The UN and the Australian government must be warned the
Indonesian army intends to finish the job they've already started,"
he added, citing reports received by his organisation that the
killings were planned before a multi-national peace-keeping force
could be deployed in East Timor.

"We have reports they plan to kill every male over 10 in the
refugee camps in West Timor.

"It's probably taking place right now." [...]

Agence France-Presse dispatch
"Refugees Starving in East Timor Mountains, Living Off Roots"
13 September 1999

[...] The UN officer also said he had received "disturbing reports"
telephoned by refugees reaching Australia, that people dressed in UN
jackets and caps, believed looted by pro-Jakarta miltias from
warehouses, were loading East Timorese onto ships for deportation.

"There were UN caps and jackets in that warehouse," he said.

Other reports said men in the UN gear were loading young men
into C-130 aircrft for unknown destinations.

Kelly said he had also heard accounts from resistance sources
and from refugees in Australia that suggested the Indonesian
military was planning "a concerted sweep" of refugee camps to take
out all the young men. [...]

John Aglionby et al.,
"How the Indonesian Army Plotted to Destroy A Nation"
The Observer (UK) (in The Globe and Mail, 13 September 1999).

[...] Documentary evidence, clandestine intelligence intercepts and eyewitness accounts show that the atrocities in East Timor have been carefully conceived for nearly a year by the Indonesian army. The aim, quite simply, is to destroy a nation. Our investigation has also revealed that Western intelligence services were also aware of the army's plans – and warned the United Nations, many months ago.

At military headquarters in Dili, a greying, tight-lipped Indonesian soldier, Major-General (Zacky) Anwar Makarim, outlined what he wanted done. The militias were to conduct house-to-house searches in pro-independence towns and villages and put Dili under siege. All routes in and out of the city were to be blocked, and water and electricity supplies cut. All communications with the outside world would be stopped.

Then, the commanders were told, their men would have to round up thousands of women and children who would be trucked across the border into Indonesian West Timor. Thousands of people who were more amenable to rule from Jakarta would be shipped in to replace them. Finally, and crucially, the United Nations and all journalists would be forced out. The generals wanted no witnesses to the killings. [...]

[Comment: Killing of whom, exactly?? These passages, the heart of the description of Indonesia's genocidal strategy in one of the most extensive media treatments of this subject, are almost comical in their avoidance of the core atrocity: the gender-selective execution of men. Anyone willing to do the math can see who's left over to be slaughtered if women and children are excluded from the analytical equation (the reality is of course far more messy than the Herald's summary suggests). But acts of gendercide, which Aglionby has already noted in passing (see earlier coverage), attract no notice in this broader examination of Indonesian military strategy.]

Mark Dodd,
"Refugees Shot At as They Starve"
The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 1999.

[...] [Timorese guerrilla] Commander Ruak blamed the Indonesian military for torching
district centres at Manatuto, Baucau and Viqueque. "In the small
villages the fires are the same as Dili or even worse - total chaos.
The population has no help, no protection, no food, no water and
no medicine." [...]

[...] Most refugees who have crossed the land border, fleeing
the post-election violence in East Timor, are staying in the
Atambua area, where they were sheltering in groups of
800 to 1,000 people, one source said.

"You see displaced people behind houses," he said.
"Each camp has a co-ordinator either military or militia."

Two travellers said young men are rarely seen in the
camps. "What is happening to the young men? Are they
recruited by force?" one asked.

Other sources said many of the refugees in Atambua
were pro-Indonesian and probably families of militiamen
who have been ordered to fight across the border.

A young East Timorese who fled to Indonesian West
Timor called the refugee centres "concentration camps".
He said he had been able to stay elsewhere.

"We don't want to register at the camps, because if we
register, we go on a blacklist and the militias will force us
to follow them," he said. [...]

The source said militias had been "sweeping" the camps,
looking for supporters of East Timorese independence.
"We definitely know the militias are going around
Kupang," the source said. [...]

The East Timor Human Rights Centre (ETHRC) is deeply concerned about the plight of the growing numbers
of East Timorese refugees in West Timor.

On September 11, Australia’s Minister for Defence, John Moore, estimated that 180,000 refugees had already
arrived in West Timor. Between Monday and Wednesday, trucks filled with people arrived hourly, and on
Wednesday, Hercules planes carrying Indonesian soldiers accompanied by women and children believed to
be their families were arriving every fifteen minutes. Yesterday, Sunday September 12, another group of
refugees arrived at Kupang airport from Lospalos, in the east of East Timor.

On September 12, approximately 16,000 refugees were in Kupang, in five different areas: Noelbaki village,
Naibonak military complex, Kupang Sport Building (GOR), KONI Building and Golkar’s building. Sources
confirm that refugees are without adequate food, and are extremely thin and demoralised.

Refugees Killed in West Timor

Reliable sources have confirmed that in Atambua on Monday September 6, an East Timorese refugee was tied
up and then repeatedly stabbed until he died, in the front of a large number of refugees. The perpetrators were
Indonesian military and militia. In Kupang, a further two refugee men were first shot dead in front of their
families and friends and then taken to an unknown place.

Indonesian military terrorises towns

Reliable sources confirm that there is a significant presence of Indonesian military, police and militia, and that
it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between these three forces. Indonesian military, police and militia are
patrolling both Kupang and Atambua, and are carrying out operations, particularly at night, where they search
for East Timorese men, including independence supporters. Between Monday September 6 and Thursday
September 9, the streets were deserted, and the town extremely tense. Sources fear that East Timorese men
and independence supporters are being rounded up to be assassinated. There are unconfirmed reports that on
Friday morning all refugees in Atambua were forced to form a line and report their activities to Indonesian
military and militia. An unconfirmed number of refugees were then taken to an unknown place using two
trucks, where they were allegedly tortured and then killed. [...]

{...] Dr. McNaughton said witnesses had confirmed to him
yesterday the burning of bodies on Saturday and early
Sunday.

"We have eyewitness descriptions of piles of bodies
being burnt on the streets of Dili."

He and the director of another group, Timor Aid, Ms.
Maria do Cea Federe, said there were reports from Dili
of ships leaving the harbor, loaded with forcibly deported
refugees and then the ships returning empty after a very
short time.

They said they feared people were being thrown
overboard en mass. There were also many reports of
people being shot on the wharves of Dili.

[Speculative Comment: I think it is likely that the burned bodies are victims of the gendercide, but the report of whole groups of refugees being thrown overboard from boats suggests that many indiscriminate acts of ethnic slaughter may also be taking place. The "gendercide" is, in my view, an important part of the story, and so far the most severe atrocity; but it should not be allowed to overshadow the more general horror visited upon the Timorese people as a whole.]

KUPANG, Indonesia, Sept. 13 — Jani thought he was safe on the ferry.
After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two
college friends to safety, he thought.

Then the militiamen boarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they
announced as the boat prepared to depart. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the
militiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others?" they demanded, Jani
recalls. "No, no other young men," his friends replied in a last gift of
kindness.

They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the
front of the boat and killed them as 200 refugees watched. Gomez's body
was dumped into the sea, DiSilva's on the ground by the dock.

Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other
refugees. A woman motioned to him to hide between her and her children.
The searching militiamen walked by.

The account of Jani, now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the
mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage by militia gangs
in East Timor following the territory's overwhelming vote for independence
from Indonesia were systematically culled from the population at large.

Young men, political opponents of the Jakarta government, Roman
Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the independence
opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the techniques
of systematic killing seen in Kosovo.

In Jakarta today, the top U.N. official for human rights said she had
gathered consistent and credible evidence that members of the Indonesian
armed forces and police had engaged along with the militias in a
"well-planned and systematic policy of killings, displacement, destruction of
property and intimidation" that could lead to prosecutions before an
international tribunal.

Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said
President B.J. Habibie agreed in a meeting today on the need for an
international commission of inquiry, the first step toward establishing a
full-fledged criminal tribunal, similar to the war crimes panels set up after
the genocide in Rwanda and the massacres in the former Yugoslav
republics.

She said it was urgent for an international peacekeeping force to be
deployed quickly to begin amassing evidence, because "there has been
some burning of bodies and dumping of bodies into the sea," as the
perpetrators of massacres in East Timor attempted to "cover up tracks."

But she said the scale of the abuses was so massive and the witnesses so
numerous that a committee of experts should easily be able to find enough
evidence for prosecutions and that members of the armed forces would
likely be implicated.

"I don't know how far up the scale that can be traced," Robinson said, "but
certainly there will be accountability on a significant number wearing army
uniforms or in a position of local authority."

Beside the killings and the expulsion of people from East Timor's cities,
Robinson said she also had heard from relief agencies about some "very
worrying allegations of rapes of women" in refugee camps in western
Timor, which is part of a separate Indonesian province. She said those
accounts need to be verified.

The move to begin an international inquiry into the Indonesian military's
conduct in East Timor is a delicate one for Habibie, given his precarious
relationship with the armed forces and his need to secure military backing if
he is to have any chance of retaining his office next month when the
People's Consultative Assembly, one of two Indonesian parliaments,
convenes to choose the country's next president. No member of the armed
forces attended Habibie's meeting today with Robinson at the presidential
palace.

Marzuki Darusman, chairman of Indonesia's National Human Rights
Commission, attended the session and said the initial inquiry commission
will likely involve Indonesian investigators but that it also would have
international experts. The panel, he said, could be given "a certain status or
recognition by the U.N."

Here in Kupang, in western Timor, the militias "had names of all of the
[pro-independence] party members, and they were killing them one by
one," a refugee said.

"The militias had names, pictures, addresses. They had lists," Jani said.
"They went to the houses and to the port and to the police headquarters,
and they took people who were pro-independence."

"At night, the militias would come to the houses" in Dili, the capital of East
Timor, a third refugee said. "They were looking for young men. The militias
knew that most of the young people there were for independence. If they
found us, they would kill us."

The refugees spoke in secret with a reporter, and all pleaded that their full
names not be used. The militias that terrorized them in East Timor reign
over the refugee camps here in western Timor and move freely around the
town of Kupang. Accounts from the camps say the militias are searching
for opponents.

The fear is pervasive, even though western Timor was supposed to be a
place of safety. Refugees here shun foreigners, and several stopped talking
in mid-interview because they said they were scared. Foreigners and local
journalists are not allowed inside the camps. Foreign aid workers do not
enter; Indonesian officials who make tours of the camps insist that no
foreign reporters accompany them.

But in clandestine conversations, refugees described the campaign of terror
that followed the announcement of East Timor's vote on independence: 98
percent of eligible voters had cast ballots, 78.5 percent of them for
independence from Indonesia.

The fires that soon engulfed so many homes in Dili were not set randomly,
but were used to drive people from their homes, a 23-year-old student
said. "They threatened us with guns and machetes, and we heard all the
men were going to be killed and the houses burned. They came at night to
our house, but I ran out and hid in an empty Red Cross house," he said.
The next night, his home was burned. His family fled, and he does not
know where they are. [...]

Atrocity, Dili, September 1999

DARWIN (Reuters) - Evacuated East Timorese refugees Wednesday gave eyewitness accounts of
the bloodshed and brutality that turned their homeland into a living hell -- and said they longed to
return to a free, independent nation.

"We feel that we are completely hurt because they destroyed our things, our houses and some of
us got killed, but our heart and our home is in East Timor," said Kristina da Costa Almeida, who
has two children missing in the bloodied territory.

The 31-year-old mother of four said the militia had kidnapped her son while her five-year-old
daughter was in the care of Catholic nuns who were forced by the militia toward West Timor.

"They were taken away," said Almeida, through an interpreter, at a camp housing about 2,000
refugees in the north Australian city of Darwin.

The militia had tricked her son, she said. "The militia came back and lied to my son. They were setting up some kind of trap
and they got him and he was taken away."

The United Nations Tuesday airlifted 1,500 East Timorese refugees from its compound in the territory's capital, Dili. The
compound was closed because their safety could not be guaranteed.

Pro-Jakarta militias have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in a wave of violence in East Timor since the
territory voted on August 30 for independence from Indonesia.

Lorenca de Jesus Rodriguez, who secured the safety of all her three children, said the Indonesian army had threatened refugees
on the way to Dili airport.

"They said, 'Why you run away. You nearly got independence and those kids, just give them to the militia to eat'," she said.

She said four young East Timorese had decided to risk returning to the mountains behind Dili to support the resistance to
Indonesian rule, rather than take the chance to evacuate.

"Three of them were shot... Only one returned," she said.

Almeida said she had seen the militia shooting two young men and then burning the bodies.

The refugees also said there was a militiaman at the Darwin camp Tuesday. ``Yesterday when we had lunch he was sitting and
nobody was sitting with him...," said Almeida.

Australian police Wednesday detained 12 people, believing at least three to be militiamen or Indonesian troops, after they were
flown into Australia Tuesday as refugees.

A family of 10 and two other men had been detained, said police. "There were indications that one was militia and the other
two maybe Indonesian army," police superintendent Mick Van Heythuysen told reporters.

[...] Agio Pereira, a member of Mr Gusmao's
National Council of Timorese Resistance,
said the situation was deteriorating so
rapidly that women were killing
themselves because they were afraid of
being raped by paramilitaries. "They just
don't want to be raped in front of their
relatives; they kill themselves so that they
are not humiliated," he said.

With heavily armed East Timorese
militiamen controlling West Timor's
airports and harbours and the military
refusing to attack them, the situation in
the western half of the island is almost as
bad as that in the east.

More than 150,000 East Timorese are
now in West Timor, many of them forced
there against their will and most resigned
to living in camps run by the militias.

Foreign aid workers and journalists are
banned from the camps and there is an
increasing number of reports that the
militias are intensifying their operation
against supporters of independence.

A member of the East Timor Relief
Association in Australia said he had heard
that all pro-independence males above the
age of 10 were being taken away and
killed.

Dili, 1999

OTTAWA, Sept 15 (AFP) - Canadian diplomat Ken Sunquist, who was
part of a UN delegation which visited refugee camps in West Timor,
sounded the alarm over the absence of men among East Timor refugees
Wednesday.

"It looked very strange to see maybe 25,000 people in the
streets of the camps," and only a "marginal" number of men, Canada's
ambassador to Indonesia said in a conference call from Jakarta.

"I was stunned by the fact that the overwhelmingly vast majority
of the people are children under the age of 15 or older women of the
age 60-plus.

"You hardly see any men between the ages of 16 and
45 or 50," he continued, adding "there has been some separation of
the men from the rest of refugees."

The observers, the first UN personnel authorised to visit the
camps in a trip Tuesday, were extremely concerned about their fate,
he stressed.

According to the refugees in the camps, many men were separated
from their wives and children at the border between East and West
Timor by Indonesian soldiers. Observers were not able to determine
why.

Other refugees said the men fled into the hills of the troubled
province after seeing their families safely aboard ships bound for
West Timor. [...]

Paul Dillon and Jeff Sallot,
"The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's
Young Men:

Canadian ambassador says thousands
are unaccounted for at refugee camps"

The Globe and Mail, 16 September 1999

Thousands of East Timorese men have disappeared en route to the
relative safety of refugee camps in the western section of the embattled
island, Canada's ambassador to Indonesia said after a tour of the area.

Ken Sunquist and Norway's ambassador here are the first foreign
diplomats to visit the camps in the West Timorese capital of Kupang,
home to more than 100,000 refugees fleeing anti-independence militias
responsible for an orgy of violence in neighbouring East Timor over the
past two weeks.

"The refugee camps themselves are filled overwhelmingly with women
and children, so we're wondering where the men are, whether they've
been segregated elsewhere, whether they're up in the hills in East Timor
or if there's some more sinister explanation," Mr. Sunquist said after
touring three Kupang-area refugee camps on Tuesday.

"We tried to ask these questions on several occasions but it's clear that
the people felt we were putting them at risk even talking to them. There
were lots of police around everywhere we went."

Most of refugees seen by the joint mission, which accompanied five
Indonesian cabinet ministers to Kupang, were older men, women and
boys under the age of 16, he said.

"While we were at the airport, for example, a plane came in with 171
people aboard, 150 of whom were children under the age of 10, older
women and several younger men who appeared to have been wounded,
but whether this was done by the militias before they left or not we
couldn't tell," he said.

A senior manager with a Western aid agency operating in Kupang
confirmed that there is mounting evidence of atrocities in East Timor as
well as stories of detention camps.

"That issue [men unaccounted for] is something we've talked about, but it
isn't in the context of culling men out of the trucks as much as it is about
massacres," said the man, who asked not to be named for fear of
reprisals against his staff.

"We've had reports from IDPs [internally displaced people] of camps
along remote sections of the border surrounded by barbed wire with
people inside, but we've had no independent verification. We're
concerned obviously, we're all aware of what happened in Bosnia and
Croatia."

Mr. Sunquist, who spent a great deal of time in East Timor in the time
leading up to the occupied territory's referendum on independence, said
he is personally alarmed because he has been unable to contact many of
the friends he made.

He said there is "crystal clear" evidence that militia groups and the
Indonesian military colluded in launching the rampage of violence in East
Timor after the referendum results were announced earlier this month.

It is almost certain that hundreds of people were killed, but whether the
death toll reaches the thousands is unclear, he said. [...]

From the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)
Press Briefing - 14 September 1999

UNHCR is gravely alarmed by persistent reports and indeed mounting
evidence of deportation of East Timorese to West Timor and cases of
separation of men from women and children. Reports from various
sources speak of families being separated while being forcibly taken
to West Timor. They speak of anti-independence militias hunting
down supporters of independence in West Timor’s capital Kupang
and the border town of Atambua which has been overrun by militias.
UNHCR is adamant that no-one should be taken away from East
Timor against their will and that all those already deported must be
allowed to return. [...]

East Timorese refugees housed in the tent city outside
Darwin have arrived with stories of mass murder by the
Indonesian military in rural East Timor. Many of their
tales are being recorded by UNAMET volunteers for a
possible judicial inquiry.

Joao Brito, 15, of Ermera, spoke of the murder of
perhaps hundreds of people in his township.

Sitting inside his tent, he told of the events on 4
September, the day the result of the 30 August autonomy
referendum was announced.

An hour after the announcement,. two trucks of
Kopassus special forces arrived in Ermera. The men
were dressed in the black T-shirts of the Aitarak militia.
They were accompanied by militia members recruited in
West Timor. Joao and others watched their arrival from a
hillside coffee plantation.

The soldiers, armed with automatic weapons and
carrying cans of petrol, were after independence
supporters.

"They called house-to-house and they burned out the
political leaders," Joao said through an interpreter.
"When the houses burnt, they let the women and
children out, but they pushed the men back into the fire
where they died."

He said the force marched through the township, burning
buildings and shooting and slashing his neighbors with
machetes. The killers made no secret of their delight.

"After they cut with machete, they shouted and danced
because they are happy they kill people. They say, `You
dogs. You do not have the right to independence'." [...]

A UNAMET human rights officer, Mr John Bevin,
expressed no surprise at the ferocity of the Ermera
attack, saying it was consistent with reports he was
getting from other East Timorese.

United Nations officials who stayed behind
in Dili when their compound was
abandoned have been bombarded with
calls alleging atrocities in the refugee
camps of West Timor to which thousands
of East Timorese have fled.

"We've had calls saying that the refugee
camps are being dominated by the militia.
The callers are reporting violence,
intimidation and executions in the
camps," said Colin Stewart, a UN political
officer and one of the 11 who volunteered
to stay behind.

"The militia are coming into the camps
with lists and calling out certain people,
most of them young men, and taking
them away," he said by mobile phone
from the Australian consulate in Dili, the
only fortified building in the city, where the
UN mission has been relocated.

"But generally there's a feeling here that if
people can hang on things will be OK. A
couple of days ago the militia were
shooting at our cars; now they are
confining themselves to rude gestures.
They have looted everything by now."

There are also reports that young men are
still being dragged off the army trucks
used to deport civilians. "I stress that
these are unconfirmed reports," Mr
Stewart said. "My impression is that they
are winding down." [...]

[...]Several of the refugees in Darwin said three people
trying to sneak out of the UN compound in Dili were
shot dead by the Indonesian army.

One refugee, Carlos Mendoca, 19, who said he was
threatened by militiamen who wanted him to join their
group, said Indonesian soldiers were passing out
amphetamine-like pills to militiamen to excite them into a
killing frenzy.

The incident could not be confirmed, but UN workers in
Dili said they had heard similar stories.

Authorities said the refugees appeared to be in good
condition but many were traumatized by their
experiences and grieving over the deaths of relatives.

"These people arrived here yesterday talking about
members of their families--husbands and fathers--who
had been killed the night before," said Mick Van
Heythuysen, Darwin's police superintendent. "It's very
distressing." [...]

[...] [Quoting "a senior U.N. official"] "We are receiving lots of reports of small groups of five to 10 people
being tied up and killed in different places. Sometimes many more. The
real number, we simply do not know.

"There are lots of reports of extra-judicial killings. Even TNI
[Indonesian military] confirmed the death of Father Karim, the German
father from the Jesuit refugee service. He was killed in the middle of
the night last week in Dili.

"There are many credible reports by East Timorese of people seeing
bodies being burnt like in Kosovo. But without a systematic forensic
investigation, we will probably never know the true death toll." [...]

[...] Accompanied by a pro-Falintil (resistance army) guide armed with a machete, I came across hundreds of [internally-displaced Timorese] sheltering in little mountain valleys and in groves of banana trees mostly afraid to come down until told it was safe. In a hut made from saplings and banana leaves, a two-hour trek from Becora over arid mountain slopes, Aliza Alvez was weeping uncontrollably. A mother of four, she told me she had ventured to Becora yesterday and found her home burned and husband missing. Further up the mountain there were large concentrations of displaced people, mostly women and shy children who smiled for a stranger despite their hunger. They showed me the scarcely edible tubular roots they dug up to eat. They had water, carried up from the river in jars, but no medicine. Three children and two adults died here in the last week from starvation and disease. [...]

"Persecution of Refugees Stepped Up Throughout Indonesia"
Agence France-Presse dispatch, 22 September 1999

DARWIN, Australia - The persecution of East Timor
refugees has spread throughout Indonesia, with the military stepping
up a campaign of harassment and terror in places such as Bali and
Java, the Carter Center said Wednesday.

Churches, hotel owners and local residents were being ordered to
inform on the whereabouts of refugees, the Center said citing
reliable sources.

"Refugees from East Timor continue to be harasssed, intimidated
and forced to flee from places in which they have sought refuge,"
the Center said in a statement handed to AFP.

It pointed to Denpasar, in Bali, and the Javanese cities of
Surabaya, Malang, Solo, Yogyakarta and the capital Jakarta.

Indonesian authorities, with the assistance of local government
officials, members of the FPDK (a pro-autonomy umbrella
organisation) and suspected militia were "ordering churches, hotels,
boarding houses and neighbourhood residents to report the presence
of Timorese refugees".

In Bali, a popular tourist destination, police and military
officials had visited Timorese shelters and told them a "sweeping
operation" was underway to "arrest and drive them out of their
refuges".

This included Kuta Beach, a favourite among foreign
holidaymakers.

"Indonesian soldiers and FPDK members have approached and
threatened Timorese residents, barring access to banks, shops and
telephone bureaus."

The US-based watchdog said it had evidence that police officers
and militiamen murdered at least one refugee who was travelling by
sea from Kupang, in West Timor, to Bali on September 13.

It said a group of armed police wearing T-shirts of the
Kontingen Lorosai (the special police contingent sent to East Timor
to oversee security) dragged two refugees from their room on the
passenger ferry Anu.

They were severely beaten before one of the two was taken away.

A short time later a self-proclaimed Aitarak milita member
boasted to the wife of the man: "I wouldn't bother looking for your
husband because I killed him myself." [...]

"Timor Atrocities Unearthed"
BBC Online, 22 September 1999

Evidence of systematic atrocities carried out by pro-Indonesian militiamen against the people of East Timor has been uncovered in the capital, Dili.

A BCC correspondent was shown what appeared to be a torture and execution centre where up to 30 victims were killed then beheaded and dismembered before their bodies were thrown into a well.

The discovery came as international peacekeeping troops pushed further into the devastated territory and militia groups stepped up their activities. [...]

The armed anti-independence groups are alleged to have carried out atrocities similar to those in the Balkans.

Pro-independence campaigners showed BBC correspondent Ben Brown a site where they said militiamen hanged their victims from a meat hook -- still in evidence -- and slit their throats before decapitating them and dumping their bodies down a well.

The stench of rotting flesh was testimony to the allegations.

Between 10 and 30 people had been killed in this way, eyewitnesses told him. [...]

Horror stories of mass executions in East Timor, including the murder of almost 100 priests and nuns by the military and militia, have yet to be borne out and evidence uncovered by the Guardian in the capital suggests that they may be exaggerated.

So far 15 bodies have been found in the capital, Dili, which has a population of 130,000, and another three on the outskirts of the city, the United Nations says. However, 30,000 people are hiding in the hills above the city and have yet to come down to tell their story.

The extent of the killing outside the capital is also unknown.

Yesterday the head of the British forces, Brigadier David Richards, when asked about evidence of mass killings, said: "The bodies would have been all over the place. I haven't seen evidence of that."

In three days of investigation in dili, the Guardian interviewed almost 100 refugees, only one of whom had had a relative murdered.

In an account broadcast by television networks around the world, an Australian aid worker claimed that she had seen "bodies piled up to the ceiling" in the cells of the Polda police headquarters, with "blood streaming down the wall."

When the Guardian visited the headquarters yesterday, which had just been abandoned by the Indonesian army, the cells were littered with rotting food and rubbish. There wa sno sigh of blood or of any attempt to clean the cells.

A second report of 20 people being murdered in the diocesan offices at the port also appears to be untrue. While the offices were burned, there was no blood, no evidence of charred remains and no smell of decaying bodies.

Father Francisco, a diocesan priest at Bishop Carlos Belo's headquarters in Dili, said that reports that pro-Jakarta militiamen had opened fire on refugees, killing dozens of them, were also untrue. He said one man had died at the bishop's house.

Despite reports that up to 100 priests and nuns were killed in the two weeks after the pro-independence vote, the total number is believed to be four. "We know three priests at Suai were killed and one priest in Dili," Fr. Francisco said.

Hundreds of refugees have been sheltered by Fr. Francisco in the bishop's garden since the referendum on August 30, but he said none had reported mass killings or mass graves. "I have heard individual reports of a body here and there, but none of mass killings."

As the peacekeepers fan out across the country, there will undoubtedly be details of killings, particularly in towns like Liquica and Suai, where the militia were reportedly most brutal. But the emerging pattern is of people terrorised into leaving their homes rather than mass executions.

Suspected supporters of East Timor's independence were executed on ships taking refugees from the territory and their bodies dumped in the sea, according to witness accounts collected by an Australian election observer who has just returned from Kupang, West Timor.

Ms. Katharine Kennedy, of Melbourne, who was an accredited observer to the United Nations-supervised ballot in East Timor, fled to West Timor to escape violence after the result was announced on September 4.

While in West Timor, she noted the following accounts from witnesses:

On September 13, about 15 young Timorese men were stabbed and thrown overboard from an Indonesian passenger liner, the Pelni Awu, en route from kupang to Denpasar in Bali. The witness believed the killers were members of the Indonesian Army.

On September 8 at the Dili wharf, Aitarak militias separated men from a refugee group and told them to remove their shirts. The militias then shot 10 dead before an Indonesian Army member intervened.

On September 6 four alleged members of the National Council of timorese Resistance (CNRT) were shot and thrown over the side of an Indonesian naval vessel carrying forcibly deported refugees to Kupang.

Ms. Kennedy's accounts are backed in general terms by the Carter Centre, which has an East Timor Observer Mission in Darwin. A report released by the centre yesterday said Indonesian police and militias were seen to murder a refugee being shipped from Kupang to Bali on September 13. [...]

As the international peace-keeping force arrives in East Timor, tens of thousands of forcibly displaced East Timorese are at risk
of serious human rights violations throughout Indonesia, Amnesty International said in a report released today.

"The situation of the East Timorese people forcibly displaced to West Timor and other parts of Indonesia is becoming more
critical every day, Amnesty International said.

"We should be celebrating the birth of an independent nation, but instead we are witnessing its baptism in blood."

"Independence activists are being hunted down at checkpoints, on boats and in house-to-house searches," the human rights
organization added. "Militia and members of the Indonesian army (TNI) continue to intimidate, threaten and attack the
displaced East Timorese with total impunity."

In the report, Amnesty International documents patterns of mass human rights violations committed against the tens of
thousands of East Timorese displaced within East Timor itself and those forced to flee to West Timor and other areas of
Indonesia in what appears to be part of a deliberate policy of forced deportation by the TNI. The report is based on
eyewitness accounts and refugee testimonies collected in the field.

The human rights organization has received credible reports that 35 young East Timorese men were killed on board a ship
bound for Kupang from Dili on 11 September. According to an eyewitness account, the bodies of the victims were dumped
overboard. Amnesty International has collected accounts of other incidents of East Timorese being beaten and killed on boats
leaving Dili.

Meanwhile, armed militia groups -- mostly Aitarak militia -- operate with almost complete impunity in West Timor. They are
mainly concentrated in the border area of Atambua, but they are also present on the streets of Kupang and in Kefamenanu
District.

In Kupang and Atambua militia groups are reported to be regularly checking refugee camps, houses and local hotels for
pro-independence supporters, humanitarian defenders and human rights workers. There are also credible reports that unlawful
killings have taken place in Atambua and that some people have been abducted from the refugee camps by militia or detained
by the military.

One refugee recounted to Amnesty International the detention of his cousin in Kefamenanu:

The next day my family were forced to leave Kefameanu... When they were leaving, a civilian who works for the military in
Atambua, stopped my cousin Leonio Guterres from leaving with the rest of my family. I do not know why he was picked -
whether it was because he is a young, strong man or whether there was some suspicion about his background. He was
detained at Kodim (District Command) in Kefamenanu. I fear he may be dead or in grave danger.

The security of East Timorese displaced, often forcibly, to other parts of Indonesia has also seriously deteriorated. East
Timorese in Jakarta, Yogyakarta , Flores and Bali are facing serious intimidation, threat of arrest, constant military surveillance
and are unable to leave.

Many East Timorese in Indonesia believe they are on "lists" held by the TNI and the militias. In Bali, those fleeing the violence in
East Timor are living in fear, continually having to move location to avoid detection by militia or TNI.

"In a climate of rising xenophobia, East Timorese are easily identifiable for discrimination and attack." [...]

BAUCAU, East Timor (Reuters) - A U.N. humanitarian team that drove along East Timor's
northern coastline Saturday found a country almost entirely devoid of people, raising fears that many
more may have been deported than previously thought.

The team of experts, escorted by six armored personnel carriers and three helicopters, took four
and a half hours to travel along the twisting 80-mile road from Dili to East Timor's second biggest
city, Boca.

For the first 30 miles, not a single person could be seen in an eerily deserted landscape. The convoy passed 11 villages and
settlements, most almost entirely destroyed by fire, before encountering the first people at the town of Manatuto.

Hundreds of thousands of Timorese have fled into the hills, driven from their homes by a bloody campaign of murder and arson
by military-backed anti-independence militias in the wake of East Timor's overwhelming vote to break from Indonesia.

The aid workers were shocked to find so few had come home.

"My first thought is that there are more people who have been forcibly deported from East Timor than had been anticipated,"
Gilbert Greenall, a British government aid expert seconded to the U.N. in East Timor, told Reuters.

"If it turns out that 100,000 people are missing, that's going to be very, very difficult to explain away."

"WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?"

Dr Heidi Quinn, a medical aid specialist with France's Medicins Sans Frontieres, said: ``I was just surprised how deserted it
was. There were no people until Manatuto. Where are the people? Are they all in the hills?''

The United Nations has estimated that around 150,000 East Timorese were forcibly taken to West Timor after the territory
voted for independence on August 30. Up to half a million more were believed to have fled into the hills.

But Saturday, as the United Nations made its first land trip outside Dili since U.N. forces arrived Monday, the team passed
village after village where not a soul could be seen.

In Manatuto, the convoy was greeted with jubilation by a crowd of around 200 locals. Young men reached up to shake the
hands of Australian soldiers and a British army major was virtually mobbed as he shook hands with town officials.

The crowd shouted "Freedom! Freedom!" and "Viva East Timor!," their celebrations delaying the departure of the convoy.

One man in Manatuto, resident Tomas Carceres said there were still about 3,000 local people hiding in the hills under the
protection of Falintil independence guerrillas.

The town used to have a population of around 9,000.

There did not, however, appear to be a shortage of food -- all along the road from Dili to Baucau crops were ripening and
goats, pigs, chickens and water buffalo roamed freely.

"If I had to go through my mind and say what is my principal anxiety, it is not the normal things," Greenall said. "It is the
question -- where are the people?"

Greenall, who has also made aerial reconnaissance missions, said no major groups of people hiding had been found.

"We have not found any camps with 50,000 people in them, so the situation has lots of pluses but some very sinister minuses," he said.

The convoy arrived at the airbase in Baucau at dusk, just in time to see the last Indonesian military plane leave. The airfield,
which can take big cargo planes, is to be used as a base to distribute aid around a large section of the territory.

KUPANG, Indonesia, Sept. 24—They fled here in abject retreat, packed
onto trucks scrawled with the names of their militia gangs and bringing with
them their assault rifles, machetes and dreams of revenge.

But as East Timor's militias have settled here, across the border in western
Timor--now riding around the streets of Kupang in open-backed trucks
and wearing their characteristic black T-shirts--they have brought their
reign of terror and intimidation, this time against tens of thousands of
displaced East Timorese living in sprawling refugee camps as virtual
hostages, according to relief workers, human rights monitors and others.

There are now more than 200,000 East Timorese scattered throughout as
many as three dozen camps--some of them in churches, government
buildings and a stadium and some along the road with people living in tents
and under tarps. Relief agencies say many, if not most, of those camps are
controlled by the pro-Indonesian militias, who deny access to most
Westerners.

There have been repeated reports of militia members entering camps at
night and taking away suspected supporters of independence for East
Timor. Young men are also being forced to join the militias. This is thought
to be a regrouping, a swelling of the ranks, for a possible incursion into
East Timor, where an Australian-led multinational peacekeeping force is
gradually wresting control of the capital, Dili, from the armed gangs and
departing Indonesian soldiers.

"Right now our job is to protect the refugees, but, like it or not, there will
be war," said a 26-year-old militia member named Binto, who spoke at a
camp located at a provincial sports stadium here. "We will return to East
Timor, but we have to fight for it."

And relief agencies say they are alarmed that the Indonesian government
has announced plans to begin relocating the refugees farther away from
East Timor--part of what aid groups here fear could be a forced removal
of people as a prelude to the eventual partitioning of East Timor.

"What's happening here is horrible," he said, speaking on condition of
anonymity. "They're burning houses on this side of the border. We hear
reports of pregnant women being killed and their bellies split open. Boats
leave with 'X' number of people and arrive with less." He added: "The
militia and military--you can't make a difference anymore--are in control of
this city. And the government can't do anything."

Khin Sandi Lwin, senior program coordinator for the U.N. Children's
Fund (UNICEF) in Jakarta, just returned from a trip to the refugee camps
at Atambua, near the border between East Timor and western Timor, and
she said she saw militia members brandishing their automatic weapons
inside the camps she visited. "This is a very strong militia-controlled area,"
she said. She was able to go into the camps only because she is Burmese;
Westerners, and particularly "white faces," are generally not allowed.

She estimated that 127,000 refugees are living in the district around
Atambua. Asked how many are there voluntarily, and how many are being
held against their will, she said, "With the militia all around, we wouldn't
want to ask them."

The New York-based Human Rights Watch also said in a statement:
"Militias in West Timor are terrorizing the East Timorese, infiltrating the
camps, and systematically attempting to identify and retaliate against
independence supporters. They have also assaulted, 'disappeared,' and
killed those attempting to aid and shelter refugees."

On Aug. 30, nearly four-fifths of East Timorese defied militia intimidation
and voted overwhelmingly to separate from Indonesia and become an
independent state in a U.N.-backed referendum. But the
anti-independence militias retaliated with a vengeance, engaging in murder
and destruction that provoked intense international pressure on Indonesia
to accept foreign peacekeepers in East Timor.

As they embarked on their rampage, the militias were seen herding
thousands of East Timorese toward the border. Relief workers said they
fear that many--particularly young men, anyone associated with the United
Nations or working for foreigners, or anyone suspected of being an
independence supporter--may have been executed along the way.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, for example, had about 70
East Timorese staff members in Dili. When militiamen raided the Red
Cross compound, the expatriate staffers were loaded onto a truck and
eventually taken to the airport to leave. About 2,000 refugees, and some
staff members at the compound, were last seen being marched along the
beach. Today, Red Cross officials said only 11 of their local staff members
have arrived in western Timor; the others are missing.

Not all of the refugees here are considered "hostages." Some are the
relocated families of military personnel, others the families of the militias.
They are kept in military camps, like the Noelbaki camp about nine miles
from here, where most of the men wear military uniforms.

The militia campaign of terror has extended beyond western Timor, and is
said to reach as far away as Bali, and even Jakarta, where suspected
independence supporters have received death threats and are being hunted
down. Some East Timorese university students, and Red Cross staff
members, have been moved several times because of death threats, with
some being relocated to Darwin, in northern Australia.

"There's militia in Jakarta, there's militia in Surabaya," said an aid worker
here. "They know who they're looking for. They have names."

"The carefully-planned campaign of violence and terror carried out by the
Indonesian security forces and their militia surrogates in East Timor and in
west Timor over the past several weeks has spread throughout Indonesia,"
said the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which sent monitors to observe the
East Timor referendum and still has observers scattered around the
archipelago.

"Armed militias [continue] to harass and terrorize refugees from East Timor
who have taken refuge in Bali and several cities on the island of Java,
including the Indonesian capital of Jakarta," the center said in a report.

No one seems certain of the motive for holding tens of thousands of people
hostage. But some relief groups and human rights officials have suggested
the militias may have been trying to empty East Timor of its
pro-independence population as a prelude to demanding that the western
half of the territory be allowed to remain a part of Indonesia. The western
half, with its coffee plantations, is the most economically viable part of
otherwise poor East Timor, and many prominent Indonesians are said to
have business links there.

An aerial survey of the western side of East Timor done Thursday by the
United Nations found "very few people living there," according to David
Wimhurst, a U.N. spokesman in Darwin.

The government has announced plans to relocate as many as 100,000 East
Timor refugees away from the border areas and into semi-permanent
settlements elsewhere in East Timor, as well as on neighboring islands.

[...] After grimly surveying two charred skeletons and noting their identities,
Captain Alan Roan of the Gurkha Rifles said that compared with Bosnia,
things seem to be "not to the same extent here - not yet. There'd be whole
houses filled of bodies in Bosnia."

Asked about where all the missing people were, Roan said it seemed the
perpetrators were "more cunning here."

Hampering the search is a lack of access to the Indonesian stronghold on the
western part of Timor, where massacres of independence supporters are
considered most likely to have occurred.

There are indisputable reports of people being taken against their will en
masse to West Timor and from there to other parts of Indonesia, even as
recently as three days ago. Amnesty International said 35 men were thrown
off a boat fleeing Dili on Sept. 11.

One place to start gathering evidence is in the Dili suburb of Becora, where
a reporter found three separate gravesites on Saturday, and residents said
there were more. In just one day, a reporter who drove through the city in
search of evidence of those victims was led by residents to the remains of
seven recent corpses in six different locations.

For professional war crimes investigators, verifying such atrocities and mass
killings is likely to be fraught with conflicting and confusing evidence.

A 2-day-old grave on a college campus contains either the disemboweled
corpse of a man found hanging from a pole with his throat slit, or the
waist-down half-corpse of a man who was killed and eaten by animals,
according to differing accounts from men who said they buried the unknown
victim.

A couple of hundred yards away, at the economics building, bloodstains
marked the curbstones next to a shallow grave that neighbors said they dug
three days ago for an unidentified old man.

Roberto da Silva, a 29-year-old farmer who was hiding in the hills above
Dili until the multinational force arrived, said that he felt so angry when he
found the unknown victim that if he knew the killers he would kill them.

Da Silva, who wears a plastic rosary around his neck, acknowledges that
Catholicism preaches forgiveness, not murder and revenge. "Yes, I'm a
Catholic," he said "but if you do it to me, I have to do it to you."

His attitude suggests that UN officials should quickly investigate the bloody
revenge campaign that followed the vote for independence and initiate a
justice system - before fed-up vigilantes take matters into their own hands.

Twice in three days, angry mobs have grabbed suspected militiamen and
started to beat them before international peacekeepers could intervene to
arrest the suspects and calm the crowd.

In at least two other instances, crowds turned over suspects to the
Australian-led peacekeepers without hurting them.

Gaspar Arauju Da Costa, a 17-year-old student who had fled to the hills
with his uncle, found his pro-independence father murdered in the secondary
school adjacent to their backyard when they returned a few days ago. He is
still angry at the killers, he said quietly, but believed in "court justice. Put
them in jail, don't kill them."

His father, Paul Da Costa, 53, was supposed to flee to the mountains with
Gaspar and his own brother, but he wanted to wait for his daughter. The
militias found them first, said a female neighbor, and Gaspar's mother, three
sisters, and younger brother all were seized and taken against their will to
Kupang, in the undisputed Indonesian western half of Timor.

Da Costa's body is now in a pit behind the secondary school, covered with
banana leaves and waiting for proper burial in his hometown in the hills when
the situation is safe enough to transport it, his son said.

A black square of cloth pinned to his shirt to indicate mourning, Gaspar
looked as though he was about to cry and could not answer when asked if
independence was worth the high price of a murdered father and missing
family.

Across town in the Balide neighborhood, a burned-out house painted with
murals of Jesus and Mary hide the charred skeletons of two men who were
allegedly shot to death and then set on fire by militias and men in military
uniforms on Sept. 7. The fumes of burned flesh still hang heavy in the air.
Neighbors have left pink bougainvillea e.

"They looked for young people, but there were no young people left here,"
said Rafael Joaquin Galuso, 21, whose uncle, Geronimo Galuso, 40, was
one of the victims. "So they killed the old people," he said.

[...] Huge numbers of families are splintered in East Timor because the men,
fearing they would be killed, fled to the hills, and their families were then
taken to western Timor hundreds of miles away, where they are in camps controlled by the militias. Few have returned, and it remains unclear if they are free to leave the camps, or how they would get back. [...]

East Timorese independence supporters say they are being
terrorised in Jakarta and elsewhere by militiamen with shadowy
political connections.

Sources said that one man who had been actively involved in
searches for independence activists was closely connected to
Prabowo Subianto, the disgraced son-in-law of former president
Soeharto.

The man, who is blind in one eye, is reputed to have criminal
connections.

Prabowo is a former head of the Indonesian Kopassus special
force, which has been involved in training anti-independence militias
in East Timor.

In May last year, Prabowo was sacked after soldiers under his
command were accused of kidnapping and torturing political
dissidents.

Opposition groups say they suspect that Prabowo loyalists are
linked to a growing number of disappearances of East Timorese
independence activists who were forced to flee from their
strife-torn homeland.

"There is no doubt that people have disappeared, not just here in
Jakarta but in other places as well, including Bali," one activist told
the Herald.

"It is just a matter of how many have gone into hiding and how
many have been kidnapped or killed."

An East Timorese human rights activist whose home in Dili was
destroyed in a militia attack was able to escape to Jakarta.

"I am with a group and we move houses every couple of days," he
said. "There are a lot of people like us."

One East Timorese leader said the bodies of four East Timorese
independence supporters, all men, had been found in Tanggeran
township west of Jakarta. He said there had been reports that the
same area was being used by Indonesian commandos to train
militias for future use in a guerilla campaign in East Timor aimed at
disrupting attempts to build an independent state.

East Timorese leaders estimated more than a thousand East
Timorese may have fled to Jakarta.

"It is not easy to get here if people are known to have worked for
the independence cause," one source said.

"People have to hide on the way. Now, even here in Jakarta, they
are not safe."

Although now living overseas, Prabowo maintains a network of
supporters within the armed forces.

[...] The Carter Centre said its observers
had found refugees faced intimidation
in East and West Timor, Java, Bali,
Irian Jaya, Flores and Alor and were
also being held in militia-controlled
camps in Sumatra and Sulawesi.

Amnesty [International] and The Carter Centre reported refugees in
West Timor camps were being recruited into the militias,
although it was unclear what methods were being used.

Amnesty also said six men had been taken at gunpoint
by militia from a camp at Nenuk, near Atambua on the
West Timor border, on Monday and have not been seen
since. [...]

[Note:No evidence yet that these were gender-selective atrocities; provided for context.]

DILI, East Timor, Sept. 29—One day after the United Nations agreed to
launch a formal inquiry into human rights abuses committed by Indonesian
troops and their militia proxies in East Timor, the first physical evidence of
atrocities has been discovered--the charred remains of at least nine people
in the back of a burned-out pickup truck.

Australian troops attached to the U.N. mission here visited the site today
and photographed the remains for what they said could be evidence in the
U.N. inquiry. [...]

There have been other accounts of mass executions here, but until today
large numbers of bodies had not been discovered--raising questions about
the actual number of people killed during a two-week rampage by
Indonesian troops and militiamen following the independence referendum.
Residents who survived the attacks in Dili, the East Timor capital, have
described how bodies were burned in an attempt to dispose of them
quickly and how others were dumped at sea, but none of those accounts
has been independently confirmed.

Local residents led reporters to the remains of the bodies found today--in
a vehicle junkyard at the edge of a main highway about two miles west of
Dili. The first sign was an overpowering stench coming from a white pickup
truck. In the cargo bed of the truck, at least nine skulls were visible, along
with a few scorched limbs, a torso and some charred bones. One small
skull appeared to be that of a child.

There was no clear evidence of how the victims died. One area resident
said they had been hacked to death with machetes and their corpses
brought to the junkyard and set on fire.

Earlier this week, one decomposing body was discovered in a well behind
the home of Manuel Carrascalao, an independence leader. Local people
had said the well contained other bodies, but none have been recovered.

Some military officials said today that the peacekeepers are still spread thin
10 days after their arrival and have been unable to follow up on reports of
suspected massacre sites. Just over half of the 8,000 troops earmarked for
the mission are in place, and they still have not ventured farther west than
the town of Liquica, outside Dili, to the western districts of East Timor,
where the militia groups were strongest and where some of the bloodiest
violence occurred around the time of the Aug. 30 referendum.

The area between Dili and Atambua--in neighboring western Timor, part
of a separate Indonesian province--is "a black hole," said Lynn Arnold,
chief executive officer of World Vision Australia, a relief organization.
"Nobody knows what it's like."

Sanjay Sojwal of World Vision International accompanied U.N. officials
on an aerial tour of the western district and said he found the destruction to
be greater than in Dili. "Nothing prepared me for the extent of the
damage," he said. "City after city, town after town." [...]

The western portion of East Timor is said to have been largely
depopulated as militia groups and government troops swept through,
herding tens of thousands of people across the border into western Timor,
where aid agencies and human rights groups say they are being held as
virtual hostages. [...]

David Watts,
"Charred Bodies Found in Timor"The Times (UK), 30 September 1999

"70,000 Refugees Have Returned to Dili: UNHCR"
Agence France-Presse dispatch, 30 September 1999

[...] The agency [UNHCR] has drawn up an initial register of those separated
from their families by questioning about 500 people.

These people named 1,335 people from 176 families, who they said
they had not been able to find since violence broke out at the
beginning of September. [...]

Source Unknown

[...] Since the international force arrived last week, tens of butchered bodies have been
discovered and there are fears the final death toll will run into hundreds. Three more
bodies, two of them charred and mutilated, were found in Dili on Friday.

Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said late Thursday she
would complete a report on the killings by the end of the year.

Robinson was asked by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to set up an investigative
panel including Asian experts to work in cooperation with Indonesia's national
commision on human rights, Komnas HAM.

Robinson said a Komnas HAM fact-finding commission would be welcome but not as
a replacement for an international probe. [...]

Indonesia's commission, she said, could help by going immediately to West Timor,
where some 250,000 refugees from the East Timor violence are crowded into
makeshift camps.

"I have heard very alarming allegations -- I stress that at this stage these are allegations
-- that even on the boats taking (refugees) to West Timor, women were raped
constantly and frequently and that in three camps this continued," Robinson said.

[Comment: Is there anything else of concern going on aboard the boats and in the camps, Ms. Robinson?]

[Note: Agence France-Presse provides a fuller version of Robinson's comments on sexual assaults of Timorese women: "I heard very alarming allegations -- I stress that at this
stage these are allegations -- that even on the boats taking them to
West Timor, women were raped constantly and frequently and that in
three camps this continued to be was [sic] a pattern of rape and sexual
assault. This was repeated to me in Jakarta." In Robert Holloway, "Robinson Expects Much Evidence of Atrocities in East Timor," Agence France-Presse dispatch, 30 September 1999.]